Journeys of faith to the centre of the Islamic world

Six Muslim pilgrims are at the centre of a new Channel 4 season. Matt Warman reports on their stories – and the wider issues they raise

Standing at a market stall, 23-year-old Sameh is wearing trendy sunglasses, a branded polo shirt, looking like a thoroughly Western young man. What he’s buying, however, are simple white robes called ihram – he’s one of the many millions of Muslim pilgrims who visit Mecca every year. In the next shot, viewers of documentary The Seven Wonders of the Muslim World see Sameh staring at the black marble Kaaba, the very centre of the Muslim world, awestruck.

“We wanted to make a series about the idea of prayer and pilgrimage for normal Muslims,” says director Faris Kermani. “We hear about extreme, politicised Muslims all the time, but – obviously – 99.9 per cent of Muslims are not engaged in anything like terrorist activities.”

The resulting programmes are a series of six 10-minute portraits, starting tonight, each following an individual pilgrim. There’s then a stunningly shot, 90-minute film about their pilgrimages on Channel 4 on Sunday at 8.00pm. Each has an extraordinary story, but the programmes also touch on the Muslim requirement that every able-bodied person who can afford it should visit Mecca at least once in their lifetime.

Aside from Palestinian courier Sameh, there’s also Isa, a 19-year-old from Granada, Amadou from Mali, Pakistani Noureen, Erha from Istanbul and Iranian Ranaa. “What’s appealing about them,” says Kermani, “is that they are ordinary Muslims, not necessarily people who say their prayers five times a day and have a beard; they are middle of the road, ordinary Joes, and when the emotion of religion comes through, their being normal people makes it all the more powerful.”

A major international co-production, Seven Wonders was, h

With his subjects persuaded, Kermani set about trying to present a portrait of global Islam through personal stories. “As we followed the pilgrims, first at home and then travelling, we asked them questions and made them think about things,” says Kermani. “At times I knew they were irritated by that, but I don’t think any one of them would say having the cameras there left them with a negative experience.” owever, difficult to get off the ground, Kermani says: “Even though I’m a Muslim myself, a lot of potential subjects questioned my agenda, and said, ‘We don’t know what your bosses’ agenda is’ too.”

Sameh, though, clearly finds the whole process extremely difficult. He travels to Mecca partly in memory of his brother, who died aged just 21 in a car crash. Ranaa, worse still, doesn’t even make it to Mecca because Iranian women are not allowed to travel alone. Unable to organise to go with her father, she aims instead to make the pilgrimage sometime in the future. Viewers, however, shouldn’t think that she then rails against her country’s laws.

“We in the West never seem to think you’re going to come across a highly educated, beautiful, middle-class woman who is at ease with how she relates life, religion and the political structure of her country,” says Channel 4 commissioning editor Aaqil Ahmed. “But we do. Sameh, too, signifies that there’s more to the Palestinian experience than refugee camps.”

The result is a series of programmes that attempt to capture the scale of the individual pilgrim within a religion of 1.2billion people. When they finally reach Mecca, their place in the world becomes profoundly apparent. Standing in the heart of the city, each walks seven times around the Kaaba according to ancient custom, aware that they are now standing in the very place toward which, all their lives they have been taught to pray. “You can be as secular a Muslim as you can imagine, but when it’s right in front of you it’s emotionally huge,” says Ahmed. “Until you’ve been to Mecca, the Kaaba’s just an image, but as soon as that image becomes a reality it’s quite overpowering. It makes you realise straight away that you’re quite small – suddenly you’re among millions of people, and that is a religious thing. My hope is that viewers get that sense, too.”

Also tonight, there’s a documentary simply entitled The Qur’an. “The idea of making a film about a text that’s holy to 1.2billion people is not original,” admits Ahmed, “but nobody’s ever done it before.” The aim of the season, Ahmed says, is to do something that has been very difficult in recent years. “Post 9/11, programme makers and commissioners, myself included, have been looking at issues involving 9/11. What we’ve not done is to go back and look at what people actually believe in – the belief structure and the story of Islam.”

The Seven Wonders of the Muslim World starts tonight on Channel 4 at 7.50pm; The Qur’an follows at 8.00pm